Kiera Westphal

AI + People Analytics

Conceptualized and built a platform that surfaced data for an AI powered product.

  • UX/UI Design

At a glance

Company

Workday Analytics

2018-2019

Role

Product designer, strategy through shipped iteration.

Team

I worked with a business analyst, a product manager, and development teams.

Responsibilities

Product design and strategy management through shipped iterations.

Goal

Define the page layout and framework for a new Analytic Application platform that visualizes Workday and non-Workday data and highlights the drivers of business performance.

Outcome

Converted a product strategy into a visual framework for a shipped analytics platform.

This ambitious project began by translating a business analyst's vision into personas, a storyboard, and ultimately an interactive dashboard platform using AI to surface people analytics from Workday data and non-Workday data. Define the page layout and framework for a new Analytic Application platform that visualizes Workday and non-Workday data to highlight the drivers of business performance.

Personas
Defining the personas was the first step in realizing the vision of the Business Analyst.

Decipher the Vision

I wore both product manager and designer hats while discovering People Analytics for Workday. Initially, I worked directly with a product strategist to decipher his vision. As we talked, I extracted personas, their characteristics, and mental models from the story and defined them. This helped us understand who we were building this platform for.

Storyboard
Building the personas and storyboarding were building blocks to building the framework for this product.

Building a Platform for People Analytics

As I sketched the storyboard for how the product would work based on the personas we defined, I began building a broader workflow to design the platform.

Delineating the Flow

Through multiple discussions and iterations, I mapped out how the application would work. The development team needed to build a new platform for the product. Although the Discovery Boards platform was a static tool used for visualizing data, it had the most promise for building out the Analytic Application dashboard.

Map of the flow with Personas
Mapping the flow with Personas to tell the story.
Prototype of early wireframes
A prototype the early wireframes to try to make sense of the Application.

Merging with an Acquired Startup

Workday acquired a Prague-based company for its innovative AI technology to surface data within the application. While the company was integrating, I designed a platform and features as we built a new product framework on top of the existing Workday Discovery Boards Platform. I discussed capabilities with the product owner and sketched preliminary wireframes to document how the application would work.

 

 

People Analytics Hiring page
The refined Hiring page moves the tabs from the bottom of Discovery Boards to the top.

Refined Wireframes Imagining the Product

As development built the framework, I turned a static dashboard tool into a dynamic page. I moved tabs to the top and created an experience that made it easy to drill down into more detailed information, with a drawer of additional stories.

Outcomes

This project moved quickly as we integrated with a newly acquired company. The new company's developers integrated their codebase while we rebuilt the Discovery Boards Dashboard in ReactJS. In addition to designing the platform's foundations with strategists and engineers, I designed a feature that showed how a visualization would move around the page in the new React Framework.

Working with an AI Platform

This complex project had many moving parts. It was exciting to build a product from a concept through to execution. We also welcomed a Prague startup and built with their team. The product shipped in 2019 based on this framework, and it became a core offering and the foundation for new products and services for Workday Analytics.